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Cover of Hot Spots: Creating Lesbian Space in the South

Sinister Wisdom

Hot Spots: Creating Lesbian Space in the South

Sinister Wisdom

€7.00

Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots explores the Southern spaces where lesbians gathered and organized during the past forty years. The ways that lesbians came together during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were many and varied. There was no social media, no high-speed communication. Lesbians relied on the US Post Office, telephones, and face-to-face contact. Public advertising such as newspaper ads, flyers, and leaflets had to be done carefully and discreetly. Learning about events of the past gives templates by which to formulate and support activism in the present and future. Oppression, restriction, discrimination, and disempowerment can take many forms, some more insidious than others, and activism can be especially difficult when one is a member of a despised and criminalized minority. Sometimes, the most we can do is be ourselves and live the truth in our lives.

This issue of Sinister Wisdom, fourth in a series of special issues covering lesbian-feminist activism in the late twentieth-century South, focuses on lesbian gathering places and ways that lesbians created community while continuing activism.

Language: English

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Cover of Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989

Sinister Wisdom

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989

Julie R. Enszer

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

Cover of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition

Sinister Wisdom

The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition

Judy Grahn

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book, The Highest Apple. In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text with her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling. Grahn situates poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Broumas as central to lesbian culture—and more radically as central to society as a whole.

This new edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition includes Grahn’s in depth analysis of poetic work by her friend and comrade Pat Parker and suggests a transactional approach to poetry as uncovering layers of the self. Grahn assembled this text in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple for contemporary readers. A new introduction by Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, and editor notes by Alicia Mountain along with six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the on-going significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

Cover of Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Sinister Wisdom

Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival

Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

Cover of Radical Muses (Sinister Wisdom nr. 113)

Sinister Wisdom

Radical Muses (Sinister Wisdom nr. 113)

Julie R. Enszer

Periodicals €10.00

Sinister Wisdom 113: Radical Muses features an eclectic array of contemporary poetry, prose, and art by lesbians from around the world, including new work by: Andrea Assaf, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Marina Chirkova, Estela González, Barbara Haas, Nancy E. Lake, Vi Khi Nao, H. Ní Aódagaín and much more!

Cover of The My Comrade Anthology

Boo-Hooray

The My Comrade Anthology

Linda Simpson

Periodicals €30.00

The My Comrade Anthology collects pages from past issues of My Comrade selected by Linda Simpson, printed in a substantial 256-page volume on newsprint.

My Comrade was an underground gay culture zine that set itself apart from the deluge of Xeroxed zines popping up in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Through parody of both mainstream tabloid magazines and the self-serious gay press, a campy and ironic sensibility, and radical left sympathies and sloganeering, My Comrade captured the zeitgeist of the gay downtown scene. Publishing 11 issues between 1987 and 1994, and three issues since, My Comrade documents the last years of underground gay culture before marriage equality and representation at elite levels of American society became the primary drivers of gay politics and aesthetic production. My Comrade was briefly revived from 2004 to 2006, and again on the occasion of the exhibition “My Comrade Magazine: Happy 35th Gay Anniversary” at Howl! in 2022.

Cover of How to Sleep Faster 1

Arcadia Missa

How to Sleep Faster 1

Various

Periodicals €10.00

How to Sleep Faster is published as part of the collaborative discussion that form the critical direction of the gallery. and sits alongside the first two exhibitions – Sleep Faster (February), and How to Carve Totem Poles (March). It has been put together as an open ended continuation of this dialogue through which we seek to understand the contradictions / complexities that define and form our experience, existence and participation in a contemporary digital-analogue creative environment.

Arcadia Missa Publications; Rozsa Farkas, Tom Clark, Jammie Nicholas, Laura Farley (eds).

Cover of GLEAN 9 - Autumn 2025

GLEAN

GLEAN 9 - Autumn 2025

Jota Mombaça

Periodicals €20.00

Art is slow attention. Autumn 2025

Guest Editor: Jota Mombaça

With Contributions from: Rosana Paulino, City Report São Paulo, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Bruno Baptistelli, Françoise Schein, Anna Maria Maiolino, Rubem Valentim, Els Opsomer, Elen Braga, Julien Creuzet and Lieven De Boeck. 

GLEAN is a Brussels-based magazine for contemporary art with quarterly publications in both English and Dutch.

Cover of Issue #60 - Gender Disarray

Movement Research Performance Journal

Issue #60 - Gender Disarray

Kay Gabriel, Amalle Dublon and 2 more

Under the direction of four contributing editors—Amalle Dublon, Kay Gabriel, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, and Anh Vo— we’ve assembled a new body of work by mostly trans and queer artists reflecting on the keyword “gender” and its relation to contemporary performance. Their work moves across multiple genres of writing, from analytic essays to poetry to performance scripts. 

“Read My Lips” is a phrase that will be familiar to longtime readers of the Movement Research Performance Journal—so familiar that the mere reference will bring to mind an image posted by the artist collective GANG, an image that lies at the heart of one of the journal’s most spectacular moments. Issue #3, with its focus “Gender Performance,” was published in 1991 amid that era’s Culture Wars, receiving almost immediately negative reception from government officials (the NEA threatened to withdraw funding from Movement Research) and many members of the dance community (who considered Issue #3 to be deliberately provoking the so-called “war,” intentionally taking a political position that some worried might comprise future funding of the field). In the thirty-three years since its publication, Issue #3 has developed a patina familiar to many artist-activist histories that are looked upon with romance and nostalgia, often by those for whom that history is only a fantasy (rather than a lived experience).